TheDoctor [they/them]

Best of luck. It’s slow but you’ll get there

Like in the early stages of burnout for me, even getting up off the couch to go to the bathroom was a struggle. And for me, this was my first big autistic burnout, which meant that I needed to reorient my relationship to work, play, and self-care to make sure I was doing all of them in a sustainable way. But in the beginning, that meant if I couldn’t do more than 5 minutes of a task, I wouldn’t beat myself up. But starting with that 5 minutes was a way for me to push myself just a little. Because the normal advice is “let yourself relax” and that advice just didn’t work for me. For one, I didn’t have the support to be unemployed for long periods of time. And for two, being depressed and laying immobile on the couch wasn’t relaxing in the first placed. I was just stressed while appearing relaxed. So getting back to doing things was my way out. And so I built up a tolerance for that and slowly built up the ability to do things sustainably while also pushing through the burnout to survive, which made it last longer. But eventually the sustainable stuff won out. I rest more than I used to and have a better relationship with breaks and self care but I’m working full time in my field again and pursuing betterment both in and outside of work. That said, I work in a job where I can flex my hours and take the breaks I need pretty much at will as long as I let my coworkers know and get my work done. I’m aware I’m very lucky to be able to do this and that it’s not a universal solution. But I’m just trying to be as honest as possible about my experience.

I originally came across that idea from someone on TikTok who was studying burnout for their doctorate. But I can’t find them now. The closest I could find for you in terms of a citation was this:

Evidence suggests that [burnout] has relatively high stability over time, with studies showing that physicians who score high on burnout assessment at one point in time tend to continue to do so at subsequent points, at least up to about 3 years.

source

Edit: I’ll say that in my experience, this timeline is for full recovery, not for reaching the point where you can sustainably work again. One thing I got told that helped me was to plan out in detail what I think my daily schedule would look like outside of burnout and pick one thing to focus on starting to do 5 minutes at a time. And that looked like me literally quitting halfway through cooking instead of pushing myself to finish sometimes. The exhaustion is real but if you don’t have any other major mental health factors (like if you’re in your early 20s and this is your first major autistic burnout for example) then getting back to where you were is realistic.

Is it possible you burnt out at your old job? That takes years to recover from properly and takes a lot of radical self acceptance and being okay with rest